Kenya Continues to Emerge as Africa’s Sillicon Valley

The month of November was crucial to the continuation of Kenya’s dominance in the world of Information Communication Technology (ICT) innovation and investment. Dr. Bitange Ndemo, Kenya’s Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communication, emphasized Kenya’s capacity to improve and expand their ICT sector. Ndemo suggested that the government should shift its focus from extra taxation and instead focus on efficiency, which will lead to more revenue for the government.

Ndemo then explained that digitization of government is one of the strategic pillars of the National ICT Master Plan. She explained that digitization of the lands registry had seen revenue collected rise from Ksh. 800 million to Ksh. 9 billion. Ndemo added that digitization around the country stood to make the country more than Ksh. 200 billion in additional revenue. She also stated that fully digitized hospitals were expected to bring savings of 40 percent in the healthcare sector.

A major contributor to Kenya’s ability to accomplish its task of being Africa’s leader in ICT, are the plans to construct the fifth undersea fiber optic cable that would provide Kenya with an opportunity to more than quadruple its current bandwidth capacity. Kenya currently has four undersea cables that also service all of Kenya’s neighboring countries and provide over 5,261,919 Mbps international connectivity.

The latest sector statistics by the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) reported that 17.38 million people in the country had access to the Internet as of December 2011, marking a penetration rate of 44.12 percent. With the completion of the fifth undersea cable, these statistics will drastically increase.